Last weekend, we did some entertaining -- friends yarbiedoll and I knew from college on Friday night and most of Saturday, and beeler and reba_quate Saturday night. We spent a lot of the time playing games and chatting. At one point Saturday night, yarbiedoll piped up with:

I really liked Pirates until I saw The KKK.

What could have made her say that? Well, it's all the fault of an awesome game called Apples to Apples. If you like words and have at least three friends who will play with you, you need this game. We played for hours.

The basic gist of the game involves matching nouns to an adjective that describes them. The players take turns being the judge. When it's your turn to be the judge, you flip over a green card (which contains an adjective) and the players all pick a red card (which contains a noun) from their hand of seven red cards. The object is to be the player that plays the noun which, in the judge's opinion, most closely matches the adjective for the round. In the case above, yarbiedoll was the judge and the adjective she revealed was "Rough." For a while, it looked like the person who played "Pirates" was going to win, but the last red card she turned over was "The KKK," which she thought was a better match. The conbinations between absurd nouns and adjectives are often hilarious and give players many opportunities to try to influence the judge's decision by playing cards in ways that most apeal to the judge. For example, no matter what the green card I reveal is, if I'm the judge you'll almost always win if you play the "Apple Pie" red card because I love apple pies so much. The decision of the judge is final, but feel free to try to influence the judge.

Anyway, a good time was had by all. Mad props to sethcohen and estherchaya for introducing me to Apples to Apples last year. It's the best game ever. If you like words, you'll agree.

No, you wouldn't suck at it. It's not like most word games. You often get points for craziness that you wouldn't get in other kinds of games. Plus, when it's your turn to be the judge, you get to make the rules about what matches, and that's always fun.

Trust me on this one, I know you well enough to know that you wouldn't suck.

Trust me. This is unlike any word game you're thinking of. And check out lcowper's comment for more examples of where the "word game" part of it doesn't even need to make too much sense and you can sill win.

Yupyup. We do play with one very common house rule-- by the rules, the last person to play a card doesn't get his in, but since we play 1) with a broad range of ages and 2) a very casual, get-up-and-visit-the-facilities-and-then-grab-a-Coke game we don't much care for that rule, so we don't use it. Makes for a more casual game.

We also, as a person accumulates green apples, try to come up with a fictional character that fits all of them-- "Okay, so Megan is enormous, charming and naive... umm... Fezzig from The Princess Bride maybe...?"

I once won the green apple "delicate" for playing the card "elephants"-- it just created such a bizarre mental image that the judge couldn't resist. In truth, I didn't have *anything* that matched delicate, so I just picked one that way didn't fit in the hopes that the humour would win out.

The game's as much about what you know about your friends as the words themselves-- T is into classic literature, so Jane Austin might work for her where it wouldn't with someone else; K is into bondage gear, so Handcuffs will almost always work with her; and so on.